Long John

Chrono Trigger is a Japanese role-playing game that was released on the Super NES gaming system back in 1995. As an avid JRPG player at that time, I eagerly anticipated its release. I was already a big fan of the Final Fantasy series of games, and since the same company––Squaresoft (now Square Enix)––was releasing Chrono Trigger, I had unreasonably high expectations. The weird thing is that it easily surpassed those expectations.

The previous Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy VI, captured my imagination with its incredibly developed and nuanced characters, its complicated, thoughtful, and powerful story, and––at the time––breathtaking graphics. Chrono Trigger upped the ante by promising that––and time travel!––while also bringing in famous manga artist, Akira Toriyama (most famous for creating the Dragonball series), to design the characters.

While a bit more “cutesy” at times, Chrono Trigger matched the metric established by Final Fantasy VI and integrated things like more interesting combat systems and time travel mechanics.

But, for me, it’s the characters that stand out. Always drawn to the tragic, I became a big fan of the character Frog. He was a human knight who was transformed into an anthropomorphized frog after failing to save commander from dying at the hands of the villain and barely fought back when his fate was cast upon him. Come to think of it, he shares a lot of similarities with Cyan Garamonde, my favorite character from Final Fantasy VI.

All that being said, it’s sometimes also just fun to draw frogs doing silly things like holding a sword.